


Past Tense

by unintelligiblescreaming



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Crew as Family, Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, Found Family, Gen, Introspection, Loneliness, Mild Angst, Team as Family, god i love lucretia, starts with childhood and goes through canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-07 05:27:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12226686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unintelligiblescreaming/pseuds/unintelligiblescreaming
Summary: When we die, our memory survives. Lucretia preserves the memories of entire worlds consumed by the Hunger, and through her, those worlds live on.





	Past Tense

When Lucretia considers her life, she finds that she has no origin story. There’s no tragic backstory, no initial act of heroism that set her on her path.  
  
There’s only this:  
  
The morning of her thirteenth birthday, she wakes to golden light spilling through her window and drenching the room in warmth. She’s mesmerized. Her hometown is always hazy or drizzly or too hot to enjoy, and as she witnesses these perfect rays of sunlight, she wants to commit it to memory forever. The day after, however, the sky is back to a flat gray, and she tries to remember precisely how the light hit the floor, and she can’t, not _precisely_. She realizes that as time goes on she’ll remember it less and less, and she’s struck by the sudden fear that one day she won’t remember at all.  
  
She is human and imperfect and someday her mind will run down like an engine without oil, and all these transient moments will vanish because she will no longer be there to remember them. She stands there, barely thirteen years old, with time’s gargantuan specter looming before her, and she feels a slow creeping fear that will never ever stop haunting her, not for as long as she lives.  
  
Her birthday present from her mother was a small diary hand-painted with bright pink flowers. She rushes into the spare room where she placed the small pile of presents and topples it in her haste to get at the journal. She grabs a pen from a nearby table and begins to write feverishly. She struggles with adjectives—was the light ‘golden’, or just yellow? Is ‘golden’ too flowery; should she stick to the plain facts? Does she trust her perception enough to use the word ‘golden’ as if it were the simple truth?  
  
Hours later, her mother finds her laboring over her very first journal entry, ink stains on her fingers and fierce concentration on her face. “It’s dinnertime,” she says, a little concerned.  
  
“But if I write it down, it won’t be lost,” she says earnestly, looking up at her with wide eyes, and her mother sighs and lets her keep going. She brings her daughter dinner there, and turns on the lamp so she isn’t writing in the dark.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The Hunger is mind-breaking. It shatters belief. It’s inescapable and terrible and it takes away everything Lucretia has ever known and loved, and she weeps at the weight. Everything is gone but she is still here, and she cannot afford to mourn in peace, because the memories she carries are the only trace of her home that remains. She set out on this mission to record worlds yet unknown. She never thought her true task would be to immortalize the world she leaves behind.  
  
So she sits down with a pen and an empty journal and stares at the blank white page, thinking of how to begin. The enormity of the task swamps her. How does she begin? ‘Today, the world ended.’ Stark and simple. But no words can contain the enormity of what she’s seen.  
  
And then there’s the question of how to describe the darkness that swallowed her world. The word ‘darkness’ is not sufficient. The Hunger defies words entirely—it’s the blank page that stifles story, the silence that suffocates song. Anything she writes, she finds herself scribbling out. She wonders if she should even try.  
  
But she refuses to abandon her task, and this is why:  
  
She was raised in a quiet household with a great deal of caring and love, by a single mother who taught her how to read and bought her all the books her salary could afford. She read old ballads and epic poems and learned what made someone a hero. Leadership, selflessness, strength… well, she didn’t have any of those things, but that was okay. She had never really thought of herself as a hero anyway.  
  
All her stories took place in the distant past. Maybe there weren’t any heroes left anymore. Once she wondered aloud if there were any stories left to tell.  
  
Her mother ruffled her hair. She was seven years old. “Don’t you worry. There will always be stories to tell,” she said.  
  
So she refuses to drown herself in silence, because silence would be a victory for the Hunger, because even here, at the end of the world, there is a story that she must tell. She defies the ravages of time and writes, not perfectly, but with great feeling. She tells the story of the seven, and she tells it well.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
In theory, practical immortality is a gift. In reality, it’s more like a curse.  
  
At least, that’s how Lucretia sees it. Taako and Lup feel differently, but then, it only gives them a greater excuse to live like they’ll be young forever. They’re Lucretia’s polar opposite; she’s the most timid of the seven, always second-guessing herself. Frankly, Taako’s casual condescension and Lup’s explosive excitement have mildly terrified Lucretia from the moment they met—the sheer energy of their presence demands attention in a manner she would classify as magical if she hadn’t seen firsthand what their Charm Person spells look like.  
  
(With time she will learn the minute details of what makes the twins tick, and they become her family, just like the rest of the crew. But they’re not there yet.)  
  
The other problem is that Taako and Lup are elves. They were always going to live longer than the rest of them. The summer of their youth was always going to be an impossibly long. They don’t understand what she feels when she looks into the mirror and sees a face unmarred by her ordeals. They don’t understand why Lucretia, who has spent her whole life fighting desperately against the tick of the clock, abruptly finds herself longing to be touched by the passage of time.  
  
She’s learned the hard way to accept that she’s human, she’s ephemeral, she’s not meant to last forever. Out of all the races, it’s humans that build institutions of learning that last. She believes that it’s human transience that leads her kind to work toward the preservation of knowledge.  
  
She also believes that it’s death that makes life meaningful. Which begs the question: if she can’t die, is she really _alive?_  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Lucretia tells Merle about her mother.  
  
She takes out a small book. It’s old and worn and falling apart despite the meticulous care she’s given it all these cycles, but the bright pink painted flowers are still faintly visible. “This is my first journal,” she tells him, and Merle is a kind listener, so he simply nods and lets her speak. “It was a gift from my mom. It’s… well, you could say it’s my most valued possession. Mostly I focus on recording the details of important phenomena and the actions of important people, the things that really matter, but this is one of the few parts of _my_ past that I don’t want to be forgotten.”  
  
She reads out the entries, starting with the shaky description of the light streaming through her window on that impossibly perfect morning, a morning now lost in the haze of time and the dark of the Hunger. But she did it—she carried that light with her, lifted it beyond destruction and across the bridge between universes, with no magic but the strokes of a pen.  
  
Her writing from that age was hesitant and childish, but it brings tears to her eyes. Merle lays a hand on her shoulder and murmurs comforting words.  
  
Once she’s composed herself, she says, “There’s a saying. ‘A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.’ I’m no hero, but this, _this_ is something I can do. This is what I’m meant to do. My life may not be worth singing songs about, but—”  
  
“What?” Merle bursts out. “That’s crazy talk. You’re awesome. You rummage through ruins, you go on insane quests to record entire civilizations, you do all this stuff, all while running from a massive shadowy reality-consuming monstrosity. You’re the only one besides Davenport who can fly this damn ship. You’re definitely a hero.”  
  
She laughs a little. “But I’m not… I’m not like the rest of you.”  
  
“Why?” he challenges.  
  
She can’t find a response.  
  
He shakes his head in caring exasperation. “Listen, Lucretia, trust me: if we ever escape the Hunger, they’ll want to sing songs about you too.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The year she spends alone is the worst year of her long, long life.  
  
When the ship is shot down, everything happens too quickly to process. The others are taken away, and Lucretia is left frantically fumbling with the controls, guiding the ship to a controlled crash in an area she hopes their attackers won’t find her. The impact of landing knocks her unconscious, and she wakes at some undetermined point afterward with blood dripping from her hair. She manages to stumble toward a cabinet with healing potions and raise her HP until she’s no longer on the verge of another death save. Then she turns herself to the task of fixing the ship and finding her friends.  
  
It takes weeks to bring the Starblaster back from the brink of breaking. She stares at the cracked mess of the navigation controls, thinking _Davenport could figure out how to fix this off the top of his head._ She welds steel bars back in place, thinking _Magnus could do this with one hand_. She examines broken technology salvaged from this foreign civilization’s garbage dumps, thinking _Barry could turn this into a part for the ship in a heartbeat_. She patches up her wounds, thinking _Merle could heal this with a cantrip_. She fights off bounty hunters and evades brutal government agents, thinking _Lup and Taako could destroy them with a roll of their eyes and flick of their wands._  
  
She doesn’t let herself accept the possibility that they might be dead until she’s infiltrated the capital city and seen their corpse-statues with her own eyes, because that would mean accepting that the burden of surviving this cycle rests solely on her shoulders. If all six of them couldn’t do it together, then how could she do it alone?  
  
For the most part, the months that follow are the farthest from quiet. This civilization’s autocratic government rules with a heavy hand, its citizens are on the verge of uprising, and the grim-faced prosecutors that had a hand in sentencing her friends to death are convinced that Lucretia is somehow attempting to aid the insurgents. She wishes she could—but she doesn’t know where the light is, and she’s too busy trying to keep herself alive and the _Starblaster_ space-worthy to search for it. And she knows that despite the insurgents’ desperate dreaming, the Hunger will swallow them all.  
  
But the insurgents have an underground network that she needs if she wants to succeed, so she plays off their hopes. She’s spent so much of her life listening that she never realized how convincing she could be when she chose to speak. She promises them technology and safe haven if she fixes the ship, even though the lie turns to ash on her tongue, even though she knows it’s so far from ethically correct that if the Lucretia from a few cycles ago could see her right now, she wouldn’t be able to recognize herself.  
  
She does it because she knows that if she dies, the multiverse dies with her—both the worlds the Hunger has not yet reached and the worlds that now only exist in her memory. So when she sees innocents hurt, when she knows she could step out of a hiding place and fight the soldiers and save a life, she stays still and silent and does not move, because she cannot afford the luxury of ethics.  
  
In the rare quiet moments, she retreats to a place by the fire and writes. She writes with the feverish fear of a thirteen-year-old child terrified that she will forget the color of the light coming through her window. This time, she writes about her friends, her family.  
  
She meticulously records the slant of Taako’s sardonic smile and the sound of Lup’s laugh. With painstaking care, she describes the crinkle between Barry’s eyebrows when he concentrates and the tight-knuckled grip that Davenport keeps on the ship’s controls. She strains her eyes long into the night as she struggles to capture the precise decibel of Merle’s raspy voice and the exact angle of Magnus’ tilted shoulders. She records these details because she is so, so scared that she will forget them, and if she does, her family will be _gone._  
  
Near the end of the cycle, with the world dimming and the shadows drawing nearer, she takes the ship into the sky and does not touch down again. She watches from above as the Hunger swarms over the plane and struggles not to collapse under the weight of her friends’ absence, and she prays to any god that may be listening to bring them back.  
  
There’s no answer, of course, and in the hours before she flies through the gap between space and time and the white threads of light remake her family, she decides that she’s done waiting for someone else to save her.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She’s dreamed of a home for so long, but it was never a real possibility. Now, as the seven of them realize that this is _it,_ this is the place that they will execute their plan to hide the light, it doesn’t seem real.  
  
All her life, Lucretia has lived in the past tense. Her home lives only in memory—lives only in the scribbles of her pen and the strokes of her brush. Even as she experienced extraordinary things that only six other living beings have ever experienced, her companions were the ones making history; she was just the lucky witness.  
  
In Faerun, as she walks through Neverwinter’s grand library and watches the dappled sunlight filter through the stained glass windows, she reflects on the past century and recognizes that despite how much she cared for the worlds she visited, she could never quite separate their inhabitants from the motes of dust that glitter in the library’s musty air. She never had Taako’s bitter, defensive detachment—“ _They’re just dust,”_ she recalls him saying—but she unconsciously translated everything into yet another line in her journals, yet another fragile moment to record. She witnessed, but until after the cycle she spent alone, she never lived.  
  
She spent so long on her plan that she could hardly believe it when the rest of the crew shot it down. Now, as they prepare to separate the light into seven parts, she feels the same slow dread that she felt when she realized it was up to her to survive the worst year of her life alone. As they forge the relics, they forge history, and she has been a chronicler for long enough to recognize the inevitability of history asserting itself. The responsibility settles on her shoulders, familiar and aching.  
  
She knows in her gut that the others will not listen to her, not even when the havoc wreaked on this world proves her right. She knows in her gut how this will end.  
  
Even in this perfect world so like their own, even with all her family safe and whole around her, she is still alone.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The voidfish frighten her. Recording knowledge is the only way to preserve memory, and therefore the only way to preserve things that are now vanished. The idea that her life’s work could be erased with the swish of an inky black tentacle scares her, for all that she feels guilty for distrusting a creature as friendly and heartwarming as Fisher.  
  
Then Fisher has a baby.  
  
And she freezes.  
  
Choices flash through her mind. She’s been—planning. Not that she’ll admit it to herself—she doesn’t want to believe her own traitorous thoughts—but Lup is gone and things are getting worse and the Phoenix-Fire Gauntlet destroyed another town today and her family is _not listening—_  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Lucretia is going to save the world, and when she’s done, the entire universe will remember her name.

 

**Author's Note:**

>  _"Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?"_ is a famous quote from Sir Terry Pratchett, a reknowned satirical fantasy writer who you should totally go read right now.


End file.
